Interview: How the Drumattic Twins went back to the future

From their early days as rave icons Shades of Rhythm to their current incarnation as breakbeat titans, Nick and Lanx Drumattic have been throwing down incendiary beats for longer than some nascent outfits have been alive. But just as the two sides of their musical personas are moving ever closer together, the duo have their eye on a third possible direction. thisisbreaks.com tracked them down ahead of their album launch party at London's Supatronix next Friday night, to find out why we all need to chill, and why playing old skool nights has never been so much fun

How do you keep moving forward when you've been making dance music for more than 20 years? It ought to be a tough question, but listen to the new Drumattic Twins album Hammer & Tongs, and you'd never know this is a duo who have been around since the rave era. Actually, there are a few give away signs, more of which later, but all in all the LP brims with the sort of vim and verve you might expect from an act who'd just found their way around a sequencing program, as opposed to one which has been tweaking nobs for two decades.

The Drumattics are best known as mainstays of Finger Lickin' Records, probably the top breakbeat label in the world, but in a past life they were known as Shades of Rhythm, and toured the land with the Prodigy at the height of old skool hardcore. Those two personalities were once totally distinct, but in eclectic 2009, rave is cool again, and the Drumattics are perfectly poised to take advantage. Recent single, Back to the Old Skool, with its hands in the air pianos and blistering breakbeats, is the perfect update of the hardcore sound that made them famous.

"It's funny, with Back to the Old Skool, we tested it out and it sounded really good in the clubs," says Lanx Drumattic, on the other end of a line in Peterborough, where he and musical partner Nick are still based. "We thought people in the breakbeat world would turn their noses up at it, but the reaction has been really good.

"We are trying to break out of the breakbeat box a little bit. This album is really a bridge between what we did on the first one and where we will be going next. At the same time, we've never thought about leaving breakbeat behind altogether and doing a house album or anything like that. We've always stuck to our guns on that front. But breaks albums have become purely a promotional tool to get more people into your music and the scene."

Back to the Old Skool is perhaps the epitomy of the duo's new direction: lessy funky, more melodic, but by no means less danceable, although Lanx reckons the album after this one might move things even further from the peaktime floorfillers the Drumattics have always been known for.

"There's definitely a lot of funk to our sound, which is what attracted us towards Finger Lickin'," he says. "But we like to put a lot of emotion in there. When we first started we had to thin our sound out a bit, but we're slowly introducing those melodic elements back into it. We're testing the waters with this new album, because it's not straight up for the dancefloor throughout - although there's plenty of tracks on there which will send you mental in a club.

"The next one will be a lot more mellow and melodic. If you listen to what ASkillz does I think it proves that breaks can be about more than music to listen to in a club at 3am. We've travelled around the world and there are places where they play breaks on beaches during the daytime as well as at night, so I think we need music for those environments too."

Lanx is keen to point out, though, that the Twins are firmly breakbeat. "It's quite a solid genre. It doesn't jump on the bandwagon all the time, which we like," he says. But there's clearly room for diversification within the sound.

If the next Drumattics album does end up sounding very different, it won't be the first time Lanx and Nick have reinvented themselves. When the rave scene died a death in the mid-90s, they were faced with having to return to their day jobs, so short was cash. Then along came breakbeat to give them a new lease of life under a new name. "We had a bit of downtime," admits Lanx. "But we knew Lee Coombs and he played some of our stuff to Finger Lickin', who liked what we were doing and signed it up."

The Shades of Rhythm moniker has always stayed alive, however, as the duo still get booked for old skool gigs. It's only recently, though, that they have found themselves actually enjoying the parties again. "To be honest playing raves wasn't always that enjoyable, certainly not seven years ago, but now it is," says Lanx. "As the years go by there are records from later periods which are now getting included in the scene. We can even get away with playing breakbeat tracks."

With the likes of Back to the Old Skool, it seems the interaction between rave and breaks goes both ways. If one is the ying and the other the yang, 2009 seems to be the year when the two come together in perfect harmony. And the Drumattic Twins are sitting pretty, right at the centre of it all.

• Drumattic Twins launch their new album, Hammer & Tongs, at Supatronix at Herbal, 10-14 Kingsland Road, London, next Friday night. For more details click here.